Former sprint-car racer Austin Prock easily ditched his urge to turn left Friday at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona, Calif.
The newest John Force Racing driver began his NHRA drag-racing career at the Lucas Oil Winternationals with a straight and fast 3.784-second elapsed time at 323.04 mph on the 1,000-foot course. He followed with a quicker and faster 3.771, 326.63 to take the provisional No. 8 spot in the line-up in the opening day of qualifying.
Those were his first runs in the 3.7-second range in the Rocky Mountain Twist Dragster. He and the rest of the pro-class drivers will have two more chances to improve on the grid. Eliminations are scheduled for 11 a.m. Sunday.
He was able to race at the Winternationals because of a fortuitous conversation Don “The Snake” Prudhomme had with an old buddy at the recent Barrett-Jackson Auction at Scottsdale, Ariz.
“We started talking drag racing,” Prudhomme said of his acquaintance. “I told him Force needed a sponsor. He said, ‘Hell, I’ll sponsor him!’
“The kid is dynamite,” the Top Fuel an Funny Car legend said. “I like rookie kids. I just enjoy being around rookies and watching them build themselves up.”
Prock said his early-season opportunity “is all because of the Snake. He stuck his neck out for me and got it [a sponsorship deal] done. I owe him the world.”
John Force Racing President Robert Hight (the provisional top Funny Car qualifier Friday) said. “We were not coming to Pomona unless funding came through, and it came through . . . at the last minute. We’ve been working night and day, trying to get everything organized and coordinated. Don Prudhomme helped tremendously to put this together.”
High said of the whirlwind effort to put Prock on the track as teammate to Brittany Force, “It was really a good deal. So when somebody tells you they will come up with the money and it’s a week away, actually less than a week away [from the start of the season], you do whatever it takes to make it happen.”
Hight said Prock’s sponsor “owns a lot of companies and loves cars, loves racing. He was a bracket racer when he was younger.”
According to Hight, the decision to direct Prock to a dragster rather than a Funny Car had nothing to do with a scarcity of entrants in the Top Fuel category.
“No,” Hight said. “We decided early in the off-season that we were going to. First off, we didn’t know if we were going to run four cars. We had to find funding. But we also know that eventually we’ll find funding, so it made more sense for us to have two Funny Cars and two dragsters. Funny Cars can work together; dragsters can work together. You need two dragsters sharing data and working together. So it just made more sense to have two and two.
“It’s harder to find funding for a third Funny Car. You run into each other more. We race each other,” Hight said. “It needed to be split up. So that was our goal. We never looked at the entry list and said, ‘Oh boy, we’ve got to get Austin to Pomona.’ That was never the case.”
Austin Prock’s proud father, Hight crew chief Jimmy Prock, said after his son’s maiden run, "This is what he lives for. The opportunity he has got, not too many people get a chance to do this. That’s really cool.”
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